ABSTRACT
Sport is becoming an increasingly popular vehicle for facilitating local economic development, with many localities seeking to attract both ‘hallmark’ and regular sporting events as well as stadiums. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to evaluate the benefits to local economies, as well as some of the pitfalls, of pursuing economic rejuvenation through this sector. To do this, the first problem is to define what constitutes sports-related activity, since this is difficult to distinguish from the broader category of recreation and leisure. The working definition of sport adopted in this chapter, following Bale (1991), is that sport is activity dealt with on the sports pages of the national daily newspapers. This focus upon high-profile spectator sport, or sport as display, not play (Stone 1971), is here adopted because this type of sport has the greatest ability to produce income-generating effects for a locality. Commodified sport, or what Ley and Olds (1988) refer to as ‘heroic consumption’, is of importance to millions of people on a daily and regular basis, taking up more media space than any other industry (Bale 1991).
